End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  “How did Ramón feel during the experiment?” Kirov asked, still looking at the file. “Did anything happen to him?”

  “On the twentieth came the apparition and Ramón had his fit, the kind you warned us about. We had to strap him down. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember what had happened when it was over.”

  “And you heard nothing from the space agency? Who authorized the experiment?”

  “Zaitsev, the mission chief. We were surprised they cleared it, since they’ve turned down most of the others.”

  Kirov asked to see the target images, and Latchev took a set of files from his desk. There were six pictures: a photograph of Red Square, a portrait of Lenin, a drawing of a man stabbing a woman, a naked woman reclining on a couch, a mosque, and a drawing of a monstrous face. “This monster,” said Latchev, “is something Ramón brought with him. He says it is a god from his religion. Since he was the sender, we let him use it.”

  “How long did the experiment last?”

  “For an hour on the eighteenth and nineteenth. Then a half-hour on the twentieth before the fit began. Only three sessions were planned, so the experiment was almost completed.”

  Kirov closed the file and leaned back casually. “How many of your staff said they saw the apparition?” he asked.

  “Three of the five who were present.”

  “And how did they describe it? How dense was it? Could you see through it?”

  “All three thought it was three to four meters tall. They all agreed it was fiery-looking. But density? I don’t remember.”

  “Did it make any noise?”

  “Only for Ramón. He said it sang to him, like a high Umbanda god. He said it was beautiful. . .”

  Latchev’s words were interrupted by a short grotesque-looking man who came running into the room. “Latchev,” he whined, “Ramón is having a fit!”

  Latchev leaped up and motioned for Kirov to follow. Together, the three men jogged through empty corridors to the other end of the building. In a room padded from floor to ceiling they found the Argentine boy. Two men held him down on a cot.

  Ramón turned to the door and sat up with a force that sent the attendants sprawling. He lunged toward Kirov with arms spread wide. “Kirov!” he cried. “You will save me!”

  Before Kirov could step aside, the boy wrapped his arms around him and dragged him to the floor. Instinctively, Kirov relaxed and they rolled out the doorway into the corridor. Suffocated by Ramón’s embrace, Kirov began to lose consciousness. He did not struggle though, but gathered concentration instead. While the shouting attendants tried to separate them, he fought to hold awareness, focusing deliberately on his heart. And then, like the sky behind parting clouds, there was a stillness like deep meditation. By surrendering to its vast serenity, he could allow the energies in Ramon to speak, could hear what they were saying . . .

  A high melodious voice, more haunting than a muezzin’s call to prayer, sounded in the distance. Out of the darkness a sun was rising. Then, at the edge of his mind, there appeared a slow band of fire. A flame like a hand wanted to plant something in him. Resisting the fear he felt, Kirov focused on it. It had urgency, and a voice, and it wanted to communicate. As it reached his heart, an ecstasy started. . . .

  “Are you all right?” Latchev gasped as they stood him up. “Your nose is bleeding!”

  Bending down to regain his composure, Kirov focused his attention on the seed that had just been planted inside him. It was trying to tell him something . . .

  “Strap him down!” Latchev yelled, as the attendants dragged Ramón away. Pale and spent, the boy offered no resistance. They strapped him into the bedframe.

  Latchev handed Kirov a towel. “I thought he would kill you!” he said. “He has broken steel bars in his fits.”

  Kirov sat on the floor with the towel. In the sweet afterglow of shock, he watched a vivid image form . . .

  Two shadowy figures fringed with light circled around each other, and then began to embrace. Kirov wiped cold sweat from his face as another image formed. Two drops of water, vividly etched against an emerald wall, slid into one another. Again he wiped his forehead, bracing himself against unconsciousness. He had to face it, a voice said. He was being given a revelation.

  Two men were dressed in uniforms, two cartoon figures of his father and Ali Shirazi. Side by side they stood, as if in a satirical drawing, looking at each other fiercely. Their pride, their rigidity, their blindness to each other’s virtues were manifest in their scowls and gestures.

  In a receding spiral, living cells flowed toward one another. Clouds of dust, and stars, and galaxies. Everywhere the universe joining . . .

  “Can we get you anything?” Latchev asked, bending near his ear.

  Kirov looked up at the four staring faces. They seemed pathetic now, the sadness of Project Elefant written in every twisted look. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s wearing off. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  “That was a sexual attack,” Latchev said with a smirk. “Ramón still has an erection.”

  “He is possessed,” Kirov whispered. “Treat him gently.” Was this what the cosmonauts had feared, he wondered—the erotic element of the apparition?

  “It was disgusting.” Latchev’s assistant smiled crookedly. “We must get Ramón a girl!”

  The only way to receive an angel, Kirov thought, was to be undivided. For the least fear could turn into panic as you were drawn toward a pleasure like death.

  An hour later, after Kirov had regained his strength, the group walked through the sagging building. “There is too much sickness here,” Latchev complained. “This is not healthy work. Many of our people have skin disease—herpes, boils, acne—and some have diabetes. These afflictions are occupational hazards.”

  Kirov had heard this before. Every military project involving psychic powers had destructive side effects. And yet, certain people seemed to thrive on such activity. A group of four men and a woman described their work with pride.

  “We are certain of it!” exclaimed a muscular blond man with Slavic features. “Our Anya has had shingles for a week. We have this report from Bratsk.”

  Latchev studied a photograph, then nodded with approval. “This group,” he told Kirov, “is trying to produce skin diseases on a prisoner in a gulag near Bratsk. She has proven to be a good target for suggestion at a distance.”

  Kirov examined the picture. Scabs covered the woman’s arms and neck, and her face showed extreme discomfort. A doctor’s report was attached, describing her affliction and stating the time of its onset.

  “We work best in groups like this,” Latchev said wearily. “But our results are still hard to predict. Take Anya, this prisoner. She has responded to every one of our experiments, though she knows nothing about them. But others suffer nothing at all. Why some are susceptible and others not is still a mystery. It may have something to do with their physical health. The sicker you are to begin with, the more effect you are likely to feel. Outside of that, however—poof!” He threw up his arms with frustration.

  “But you are too cautious, Boris,” the blond man protested. “Look at Gulag Seven.”

  Gulag Seven, a prison near Novosibirsk, was a special target of their experiments. The same day this group had placed its hex—in this case a hex accompanied by microwave bombardments—an epidemic of diarrhea had broken out there.

  “But to what end?” Latchev sighed. “The Academy of Sciences will not believe it. They say the disease is common there, and dismiss it as coincidence. They say that psychotronics is a farce. How can we impress them?”

  Kirov pretended sympathy, but he formed a resolution. He would recommend the dismantling of Project Elefant. This hideous enterprise had nothing to do with the Soviet Union’s rebirth. It cast a shadow over all his work.

  But it had given him the opening he needed. The connections between Ramon’s fits, Rozhnov’s visit, and the apparitions of the cosmonauts would trouble many who studied his report. This inform
ation might bring decisive support for his proposals.

  Fringed with dirty snow, the runway seemed to stretch forever into the frozen wastes beyond Novosibirsk. No trees or mountains relieved the desolation. Waiting for his plane to Moscow, Kirov thought of Anya. One photograph had shown her naked from the waist, her breasts and shoulders covered with scabs and rashes. Pain pulled at her eyes and mouth in a way that would haunt him for years, but it had brought only pleasure to the people who had lain down the hex. One had even produced a bottle of vodka to toast their success. Kirov felt a growing depression. Were all his aspirations doomed by such perversity? Would his proposals to the Academy be twisted like this? To control himself, he paced along the runway in the snow.

  But something deeper pressed through his emotion, something left over from his struggle with Ramón. As he stopped to gaze at the bleak horizon, he remembered his father’s fight with Ali Shirazi . . .

  Young Volodya was forbidden to study with the traitor, his father had shouted, and their family must shun Islam. Kirov heard his grandfather’s answer: “To the illumined, history is under our feet. Salvation has nothing to do with past and future.” Then his father’s fierce reply: “We have history under our Soviet feet! And history is our salvation!”

  Kirov’s father, born Miron Kostrikov, had changed his name in emulation of his cousin Sergei when he left home to adopt a new identity for the Revolution. He helped build the Party in Tashkent during the 1920s, married Shirazi’s daughter there in 1931, and fathered Vladimir, his only child, three years later. In spite of his hatred for Stalin, he remained a believer in the communist ideal. Ali Shirazi and his school represented the superstition and feudalism he had fought so long against.

  “History will be under our feet,” he had shouted as he declared the old man a traitor to the state.

  As he walked toward the courier plane, Kirov felt his family’s shame at this denunciation. His mother had never recovered from it, given her allegiance to both father and husband. Like other Muslim women who married Russian Bolsheviks, she had never reconciled the two sides of her life. From that moment, she was a woman without a family she could count on.

  But Kirov had quietly defied his father. Stealing away to the desert mosque, he had taken the vows that would shape his life. As a boy of fifteen, he swore that the mystic teachings would be joined to politics. The social justice his father worked for would converge with his grandfather’s vision of a new heaven and earth. The vow led him from Tashkent to Paris and his Order of Lenin, and from there to this government study. At each step it seemed that an invisible power confirmed the way he had chosen. And now, the seed planted in his brain by a boy he had brought from the United States for a hideous project of psychic research was telling him something important about the entire process. His whole life, it seemed, was a project to find common ground. America and Russia had a common purpose—that was what this voice was saying. But there would only be room for them both in a larger Earth. In a larger Earth. Only there could the stupendous energies of the two nations find enough room for fulfillment.

  As he took a seat in the empty army plane, Kirov wondered if his thought was too grand. Surely the two nations could cooperate without these impossible visions. There were more immediate tasks to do before such an enterprise could excite a significant interest. As he often did while having second thoughts about his work, Kirov thought of his father. He saw him at the market in Tashkent, his muscular frame unbent, proudly examining the fruits and vegetables as if they had come from his own garden. The old Bolshevik saw all of Soviet Central Asia now as his handiwork. For anyone who cared to listen he would compare the life of its peoples to the plight of other nations in the region. Look at the wars and banditry raging from Kurdistan to the Indian border—the poverty, the poor education! Subsidies and fifty years of peace had lifted the standard of living in the Soviet lands of the Silk Road to the highest levels in their history. The scars on his Volodya’s feet and testicles, like his own wounds, had not been made in vain.

  Looking out the window at the rows of new buildings carved from the frozen wastes below, Kirov filled with love for his father. The elder Kirov’s witness had been crucial to his work. Without his father’s faith that the Soviet State was capable of transformation, he wouldn’t have arrived at his present position, a position from which he could help reveal the spiritual genius of the Soviet peoples. Kirov’s depression began to lift. His father had endured setbacks for more than fifty years without losing faith in his vision. He would take courage from his example.

  23

  YAKOV KOZIN ALSO HAD visions of success, for his agents had revealed the following facts about Boris Marichuk: his mother had once been hospitalized for “nervous fatigue”; he had been a dreamy adolescent, given to religious fantasies; he had “improvised” during border chases of Turkish and Iranian planes, disobeying his commanders’ orders more than once; he had boasted about telepathic powers to fellow cosmonauts; he had suffered from insomnia and daylong depressions; and, most telling of all, he had once confessed to sexual feelings toward a fellow pilot. The profile was perfect. The man had hysteria in his genes—and homosexual tendencies. The angel that wanted to embrace him was a projection of his feelings for the other cosmonaut, and the surrealistic form it took was the result of his latent instability. Kozin was surprised that the space psychologists could have missed this explanation.

  Tapes of the episode confirmed his judgment. With its embraces and beckoning to mysterious places, Marichuk’s apparition clearly had an erotic aspect. Doroshenko’s breakdown might have come from a similar panic. Both feared losing control, not only of their capsule, but of their sexual urges. Doroshenko had been chosen in part for his looks, Kozin remembered, because the space agencies had wanted an attractive hero. Their efforts had worked only too well.

  And Rozhnov had a similar history. His mother, too, had been unstable; he suffered from insomnia and ulcers; he had been interested in esoteric creeds. There was enough in his background to show a secret instability. Kozin was satisfied that these discoveries would discredit any occult explanations of Rozhnov’s or the cosmonauts’ hallucinations.

  But Kozin wanted to do more than debunk mystical theories. He wanted to permanently discredit Kirov, and his surveillance had shown him a way. His agents had learned that a secret Muslim group opposed to the school of Hurqalya would try to undermine the proposals of Kirov’s commission. Kozin saw that he could link the group to Kirov’s school, exposing them both at once. It didn’t matter to him that the Muslim group disliked Kirov’s promotion of ethnic harmony or the corrosive effect of his mystic vision on Islamic fundamentals. Their apparent similarities would make them seem fellow conspirators to the police authorities.

  To help establish this connection, Kozin told his agents to find members of Kirov’s school who might cooperate. If necessary, they could use bribery, blackmail, or torture. On the day Kirov toured Project Elefant, one of them entered the desert mosque pretending a pilgrimage. By sundown he had spotted someone he could turn against Kirov.

  24

  THE SPECIAL COMMISSION on Soviet Values of 1966 was a puzzle to many. Few stories about it had appeared in the Soviet press, and foreign intelligence agencies had never uncovered its agenda. Some who were there said it was called to review the changes in Soviet youth during the Khrushchev era—their interest in jazz and jeans and American customs, their new sexual freedoms, their revulsion at Stalin’s atrocities, their unwillingness to serve in the army. Others claimed it had something to do with the response of the Soviet people to broadcasts from space: the rapturous language of certain cosmonauts had triggered a demand for religious books, and people everywhere had asked, “Is there a God after all? That is what our cosmonauts are saying!” And there were stranger stories. Some people said the meeting had dealt with UFOs and contact with extraterrestrials. The fact that the government had never tried to stop these rumors caused further speculation. Were they hiding something too danger
ous to hint at?

  Kirov shared the general ignorance, but he suspected that there were similarities between the 1966 meeting of the Special Commission and the committee sessions in which his study was proposed. Baranov confirmed his intuition when they met upon Kirov’s return from Novosibirsk. He had gotten transcripts of the meeting from Rozhnov.

  “The old man was amazed he’d forgotten so much about it,” Baranov said as they walked near the Moscow River. “And he is surprised how poorly everyone remembers. Then he said a startling thing. No one has made special efforts to keep the meetings secret. There were about sixty-five people there, and the thing produced all sorts of rumors. But you should read the transcripts! They were faced with a dilemma like ours—cosmonauts’ euphoria in space, groups inspired by their broadcasts to take up mystical disciplines, ordinary people getting interested in esoteric religion. The rumors tell part of the truth. The big difference from our situation, though, is that the commission’s report in 1966 recommended that the government watch these things for their dangers. Then they would all be squelched. Rozhnov put it this way: the events they were alarmed about could act as agents provocateurs, flushing out the dangerous people. When the time was right, they would be arrested. So Volodya, we have come a long way. Now there is an assumption, among some of our leaders at least, that these events carry deeper connections, that there is something of value in them. We have a Committee for Science and Technology smart enough to see that. Rozhnov is sobered by it all. He told me he forgot how closely the 1966 meeting resembled the one this October.”

  “It gives us more ammunition, Georgi.” Kirov lowered his voice. “And we will need it now. Kozin is on our case. Our friends in Directorate T say that he has gotten the Academy’s consent to our surveillance.”